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When my family assume I’m lying in bed

I am stretched on your sweet tomb

From fall of darkness until morning

Weeping my torment eternally

And sobbing, howling, woundedly, unceasingly,

For my headstrong, fierce, intelligent girl

Who had been mine since childhood!

— Atáim Sínte Air do Thuamba / I Am Stretched On Your Grave, III

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The Lady of ye Lake, from The Story of King Arthur and His Knights by Howard Pyle (1922)

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Thin places are snatches of time, moments really, when we sense God intersecting our world in tangible, unmistakable ways. They are aha moments, beautiful realizations, when the Son of God bursts through the hazy fog of our monotony and shines on us afresh.

Mary E. DeMuth, Thin Places: A Memoir

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anyway just a reminder for the myth lovers out there

king arthur was welsh. merlin was welsh. camelot was in wales. the lady and the lake she pops out of; welsh. excalibur; magic inanimate welsh object. etc.

on the way to see family, i drive past a lake that in which is welsh legend, is the last resting place of excalibur.

i’m just saying in my experience a lot of these legends had been so anglo-fied in the past and it’s like, all this cool shit is celtic welsh legend.

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Monmouthshire, Wales - September 2018

Rolleicord Vb on Kodak Portra 160

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A Hackfall Folly, North Yorkshire, England.

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Lucille Clifton, from The Book of Light; “Here Yet Be Dragons”

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R. Iestyn Daniel, Medieval Mysticism: An Example from Wales

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Love is not so much a supernatural force that enters into us, with its origins in the Trinity, but rather a staged reflex of the human mind or soul responding to divine love. Love is a re-enacting of the structures of the Trinity within the human self by a gradual approximation of the self to God through infused grace; thus the pantheistic problem of using love univocally of human love and the essence or being of God is avoided. Love bridges and unites, but it does not eliminate difference. The thrust of our Welsh text however is subtly different. By explicitly identifying human love (that is love of our neighbour as well as love of God) with the love that is the Holy Spirit in the Trinity, our author is suggesting that there is an identity rather than a continuity between God, as love, and the self as loving act.

Oliver Davies, Celtic Christianity

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Jane Cartwright, Feminine Sanctity and Spirituality in Medieval Wales

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Maen Ceti, on Gower, south Wales. The massive capstone of this prehistoric burial chamber is known as Arthur's Stone. The king's ghost is said to emerge occasionally from beneath it. (Amgueddfa Cymru, National Museum Wales)

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Place-names can be emblematic, compressed nuggets of forgotten history, and the mouth-filling sensuousness of Lindisfarne may have a tale to tell. It seems that the Romans knew it as Insula Medicata, and that may have referred to an island where plants grew that were useful for making balms, poultices or decoctions. Dialects of Old Welsh were spoken down the length of Britain before and after the Roman province of Britannia, and the native name of Ynys Medcaut derived directly from the Latin name.

Alistair Moffat, To the Island of Tides: A Journey to Lindisfarne

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The Book of Aneirin, page from a 13th-century copy (Amgueddfa Cymru, National Museum Wales). 

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Wales has generally been an intensely holy country, and its spiritually has been confused - the occult crossed with the intellectual, dogma reacting against ritual, and a rumour of mystery often hovering, as it hovered around the reputation of Owain, over its affairs and territories. 

Jan Morris, The Matter of Wales: Epic Views of a Small Country

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And I wandered on the mountain Under stars and by the fountain Saw your face in every flower Felt your presence every hour

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Wendy Davies, Wales in the Early Middle Ages 

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Clogwyn Mawr, Snowdonia, Wales by Dan Thwaites